Food in Hot Water

Creating the blog was the hardest step, especially choosing the name. I decided on ‘hot water’ because my main questions surrounding this blog were: why and how is food production in trouble in Africa? We all know water plays an important role in food production but what were the many other things in-between?   To answer those questions, it began with the analysis of water resources and reviewing the stereotypes and imagery of Africa – a continent that was physically water scarce and failing at agriculture. After debunking the former myths, the next step was analysing economic water scarcity. Irrigation at times seems like a no-brainer to increase agricultural production; the fact that so many farmers avoid adopting it alluded to other factors such as cost, accessibility, politics and bureaucracy. Moving on to my latter question: Is Africa really failing at agriculture? Fortunately, Africa is indeed home to some success stories and I wanted to understand what drove their prog

In this blog post, I will be writing about one of, if not, the most pressing concerns worldwide: climate change. While climate change is not new, the current rate of change, driven by anthropogenic causes, is alarming. This post will focus on the (future) problems of Africa and what makes it so challenging before examining certain approaches proposed. Defining climate change Climate change as a phenomenon, is not new. There have been past cycles of Ice Ages and warming in the Earth’s history (Aguado & Burt, 2013) but the current climate change in the age of the Anthropocene is startling with how quickly climates are altered (Root, et al., 2003) . Climate change can be defined as alternations to any “statistical property of the atmosphere” such as precipitation or temperature ( Aguado & Burt, 2013, p. 466) . The impacts of climate change are far reaching but variable, as some places warm faster than others and precipitation patterns will change across different localiti

In this blog post, I will be writing unpacking a popular term surrounding agriculture: commercial farming. Some point towards commercial farming to combat the hunger problem of Africa’s growing population while others associate it with the exploitation of workers and land grabbing by the powerful and sometimes, foreign owners. Commercial farming, however, is a term carrying many meanings and its impacts can be extremely contextualised.   A Guardian article, titled “Only modernised commercial farms will fill Africa's plate, economists warn”, was released in 2017. The premise was that, with a rapidly growing population, African agriculture needs to increase its productivity through the modernisation of its farms. Small holder farms constitute about 80% of all farms in Africa and most are too small to implement mechanisation feasibly. To remedy this, increasing farm sizes, and adopting a commercial farm model will bring about increases in yields. These benefits will trickle do